Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sound, Performance, Installation
Website: avakoohborarts.com
Ava Koohbor is an Iranian-born sound artist, instrument builder, performer, and poet based in San Francisco. Born in Tehran, she came to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College in Oakland, where she developed a practice at the intersection of sound, materiality, and embodied resistance. She describes her approach in direct terms: “Acting where speech fails. Sound as act, not medium.”
Koohbor works across sound performance, installation, instrument building, and writing, treating found and culturally significant objects as sources of sonic potential. Her most celebrated project, Korkori (2024), transforms a backgammon board built by her father during the Iran-Iraq War into an electroacoustic instrument, exploring how personal and historical memory can become audible through sound and game mechanics. The project received a $30,000 Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and has been presented at venues including Makkan Residency and The Lab in San Francisco.
She has published three books: Death Under Construction (Ugly Duckling Presse), a poetry collection with letterpress covers printed from a linoleum block carved by the author; Triangle Squared (Bootstrap Press), a fictional conversation among John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Morton Feldman; and Of Flesh and Frequency: A Poetics of Sound Making (Lithic Press), a poetics of her sound practice. She has been a visiting writer at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center and collaborates regularly with Bay Area artists and musicians.
Koohbor builds instruments from furniture, traditional objects, and cultural artifacts — broken chairs, metal, stone, backgammon boards — transforming them into what she calls “vectors of sound production and activation.” Her practice resists aesthetic detachment; instruments are objects of relation rather than display, vibrating with personal and political history. She describes herself as a “Sound Enactor,” and her philosophy as a search for “what is” rather than speculation about “what if.”
Her work often centers Iranian women’s labor and craftsmanship as a counter-narrative to male-dominated instrument-building traditions. Electroacoustic composition, improvisation, and performance converge in durational works that treat sound as a physical and historically charged force rather than mere aesthetic medium.
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